Tales from the Other India

One of the noteworthy things about Bollywood filmmaker Deepa Bhatia’s documentary, Nero’s Guests (NG), is the camerawork. It’s almost invisible. Just like its subject — India’s agrarian crisis and growing inequality.

One of the noteworthy things about Bollywood filmmaker Deepa Bhatia’s documentary, Nero’s Guests (NG), is the camerawork. It’s almost invisible. Just like its subject — India’s agrarian crisis and growing inequality. Bhatia has followed her professor, renowned journalist P. Sainath’s work in rural India over the last decade. His enduring rural reportage is a prism through which she refracts a chilling reflection of our times — the ‘unshining’ India, where over 200,000 farmers have committed suicide, all absent from the pages of mainstream consciousness. The agrarian crisis, Sainath says in the film, is ‘the drive towards corporate farming’, which will ‘achieve’ the ‘biggest displacement in Indian history’. Look out for sharp insights on India’s growing inequality, and the part about socialites organising a ‘poverty party’. Shining and Unshining India come together in this deftly made documentary. The juxtaposition is discomfiting. NG is an angry film. It’s an uncomfortable film. It needs to be seen.